Another fact not mentioned in this article is the WWII historical locations found in the unofficial Catacombs. Back when I lived in Paris, I was lucky enough to know someone who had access to one of the Cataphiles' maps (yearly-updated with notes on entrances and potential police patrols, with closest exits and dangerous passages).<p>We visited an old school basement, which was used as a bunker for members of the Resistance. The school itself was razed and rebuilt over at some point, but the Catacombs still hold traces of this period. Being there felt very...intimate. Nothing like you'd see in a museum or a documentary, we were in the same place as those back then.
Some really old (some 10 years old, wow, geriatric on the web) websites still hosted by free.fr:<p><a href="http://catacombes.web.free.fr/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://catacombes.web.free.fr/</a><p><a href="http://exploration.urban.free.fr/carrieres/indexus.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://exploration.urban.free.fr/carrieres/indexus.htm</a>
I highly recommend this video on a group of cataphiles who setup a temporary movie theater and bar in the catacombs: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auI8QkL74S8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auI8QkL74S8</a>
> Carthusian monks converted the ancient quarries under their monastery into distilleries for the green or yellow liqueur that still carries their name, chartreuse.<p>Is that right? Chartreuse is named after the eponymous mountain in the alps, on the other end of the country and it’s been made there for ages because it’s made out of plants and herbs that grow nearby and nowhere near Paris.
There's a good couple of chapters on the catacombs in Robert Macfarlane's book The Underland (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53121631" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53121631</a>)
I just rewatched "As Above So Below" the other day. Didn't know messing around in the catacombs is something people actually did in real life.